Wear update - June 2015 (1.1.1.1956917)

There have been a few announces about the latest Wear update, including the Android Developers blog and on Google+, but here's my experience.

I was notified about the update late last night, but you need 80% battery before it will install (which is a nice feature, my phone once ran out of battery during a particularly grueling Android update!) so I charged it overnight and installed the update this morning.

Everything went smoothly with the update, and then my apps all updated as well, no problems there.  So, the new features...

Wifi

This was off by default.  You can access the settings on your watch by scrolling down on the screen, then swiping left till you get to them.  Scroll down until you find "Wi-Fi settings" and click on it.  You can add networks, but it will always open up Android Wear on your phone in order to enter the network security key.  This is a seamless process, and I quickly added my home network.  Obviously this will only work on devices that have the physical wifi hardware, but my Moto 360 does.  If you go into the phone app settings, there's also an extra option for "Cloud sync" now (assuming you've updated the app as well) which will now sync data between your watch and phone via the wifi - I found this was on by default.

Gestures

This was also off by default.  You can access the settings in the same way as above - this time you're looking for "Wrist gestures".  This is a simple ON/OFF toggle, so click to switch it on.  You'll then get a few tutorial notifications, guiding you through.  It's really simple though, you flick your wrist away quickly then turn your wrist slowly back towards you to scroll down through notifications, and you turn your wrist away slowly then flick your wrist quickly back towards you to scroll up.

There's more to the update as well, but these are my favourite new features.

WatchMaker - splitting seconds

WatchMaker (free and premium) gives you loads of tags, as I've previously discussed.  However, when I came to make my latest project, I found a couple of omissions.

The project that I'm currently working on a watch face based on The Clock by Gislain Bernoit...

This is a 56x66cm masterpiece that weighs almost 6.5kg, it's made up of 1,916 individual hand-soldered components, which took the artist hundreds of hours over 3 years to create.  It's truly one of a kind.

Having a circular screened Moto 360 watch, I decided to capture the middle part of the clock, in my homage to this amazing piece.  And given the spacing on the digital displays I found this meant displaying each digit individually.  So I needed 6 different text elements, and this is how they work...

1. Hours in day (0-23) tens - there's a tag for this: {dh23tt}
2. Hours in day (0-23) ones - there's a tag for this too: {dh23to}
3. Minutes in hour (tens) - {dmt}
4. Minutes in hour (ones) - {dmo}
5. Seconds in minute (tens) - string.sub("{dsz}",1,1)
6. Seconds in minute (ones) - string.sub("{dsz}",2,2)

As you can see, there were tags specifically for the hours and minutes that were already split, but there wasn't for seconds.  To get around this we can use "Seconds in minute (with leading zero)" {dsz} and then use the LUA string.sub command to split the two characters.

This is what I've come up with so far...

I'll be uploading it to FaceRepo once it's finished.

Hello and welcome

I'm pretty new to the world of Android Wear, having been given a Moto 360 (which I'd been lusting after since it was first announced!) as a gift.  Here's an instagram picture of me getting it, about 3 weeks ago...

And yes, that is my hand :)

So I'm learning the joys of Android Wear, with a Moto 360 slant.  I wanted to share what I'm learning, some of the awesome apps I've found, and possibly writing my own apps (if I get that far!).  I'm not much of a vlogger, so I thought I'd stick with blogging.  

There are some very good vlogs out there, including my friend's Video Gadgets Journal, which isn't specifically for Android Wear, but he also has a Moto 360, and loves showing what it can do.

So this is it from me for now, just wanted to say hello - more posts coming soon!